The fury over a bloke with dodgy tattoos on a woodwork show on Sky History shows how ridiculous “anti-fascism” has become. These time-rich tweeters really think they are the heirs to the heroes of Cable Street. They need to grow up, says Brendan O’Neillhttps://t.co/ZPuAnXpWdE
I must have missed that particular storm in a Twitter teacup. Typical, though. The self-described “Left” (a term which, like “Right”, I never use), or (pseudo-) “socialist” element has nohing much to say.
In 1989, socialism died, all over the world. That was as true of British socialism or social democracy as it was of Soviet socialism (which just expired and evaporated within a couple of years, being replaced by “oligarchic” kleptocracy), and Chinese socialism (which kept the names and forms of socialism while transforming into complete cut-throat capitalism under overall State supervision).
In Britain, the Labour Party changed from a social-democratic party with socialist roots and pretensions into a basically finance-capitalist party with social-democratic pretensions. Clause 4 (nationalization) was ditched; within a few years it was uncontroversial for the half-Jew Mandelson, Tony Blair’s most important ally, to say that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich“. Imagine Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or, say, James Callaghan saying that (in public)!
As Labour became a non-socialist party in the 1990s, the more socialist-oriented element in it became infected more and more with the peripheral politics of identity.
As a frequent browser in Collet’s London Bookshop in Charing Cross Road in 1976 (aged 19), I saw that they had shelves devoted to books and magazines about “sexual politics” and the like, as well as what became known as “multiculturalism”. I was social-national even then, and thought that those areas were, even in the context of Marxist/post-Marxist ideology, sideshows at best. I was right then, but wrong down the line, because it was exactly that sort of stuff that eventually took over, not the Labour Party as such, but the more “socialist”-leaning element within it.
What are the concerns of those “socialists” on, say, Twitter? “Refugees” (most of whom are bogus anyway); “LGBT” etc; supporting all the “Covid-19” nonsense (facemasks, lockdowns etc); “black lives matter”. After all those, maybe poverty too, but the real old-style socialists focussed on relief of poverty as of prime importance, together with the whole socio-economic pattern of society. Also, those old-style activists had a idea of how to achieve their objectives. The post-Marxists have exchanged that for what amounts to a virtue-signalling whine.
The Twitterati who think themselves “socialist” (there are exceptions), especially the “antifa” element and the Jew-Zionists, find their greatest pleasure and victory when someone with whom they disagree (usually unthinkingly) is expelled from Twitter. Most interesting tweeters (like me, if I immodestly say so) are now gone from increasingly dull Twitter.
Also, the Twitterati are often found complacently reciting that xyz (like me) have rightly been expelled from Twitter because “Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc are commercial companies and can expel or deny service to anyone”. Pretty pathetic. A surrender to the marketplace, and a quasi-monopolistic marketplace at that. No thought as to the rights of the citizen qua citizen (eg free speech rights) going beyond mere contractual rights.
One might add that Twitter is the main playground of such people. Not the real world where real events happen and where questions of politics, questions of importance, are decided.
Whining on Twitter (“slacktivism”) becomes the substitute for real political or social action.
You can see all of that in the Corbyn saga of recent years. Corbyn Labour was not without its virtues, though Corbyn was really a surviving example of an old-style socialist surrounded by those new-style pseudo-socialist virtue-signallers; political coelacanth [“Coelacanths were thought to have become extinct in the Late Cretaceous, around 66 million years ago, but were rediscovered in 1938…The coelacanth was long considered a “living fossil““— Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth].
The result of the obsession with peripheral matters (perhaps the most bizarre and off-piste is re. “transphobia”) has been that Labour itself (and the so-called “Left” in general) has become politically almost irrelevant, despite the Labour Party being the only major “opposition” to a Conservative Party government of surpassing incompetence.
Matters of wide public concern: mass immigration and migration-invasion; education; NHS services; a future for the young; security for the old; the environment; housing; pay and benefits.
There are really only two groups now vying for ideological supremacy under the superficial show of politics: the System of “ZOG”, “NWO” etc, and social nationalism. The so-called “Left”, though vocal, is an irrelevance on the wider stage.
The year 2022, 33 years on from the last “reset” of world politics in and after 1989, will be of prime importance. Large-scale change.
If I was reverting to referencing benefits in response to every question & concern about poverty, unemployment & hungry children, I'd make an effort to fix the travesty of Universal Credit which is knowingly & deliberately pushing the most vulnerable into poverty, @BorisJohnson.
Yes but during the holidays 100% of state schools are closed. And it is no secret that universal credit is not enough for a family to live on and not quick or easy to get on if you have recently lost your job. Children are going to go hungry. How can you justify that?
As you’re such an expert on “many benefits”, please tell us how much money parents will get from Universal Credit, after loosing their incomes due to covid??? And then tell us how you’d pay your bills and “budget” on that??? Tories and their supporters are horrible people.
NEW: "The threat of sanctions is causing huge anxiety for people claiming Universal Credit who are shielding".@SeemaMalhotra1 says the continued threat of benefit sanctions when the government has lost control of the virus is completely untenablehttps://t.co/GKvBMptCVi
Imagine being so blindly loyal to a failing bunch of incompetent liars that you would read a pre-prepared statement advocating against providing school meals for children.
Brendan Clarke-Smith is Tory Scum. A pathetic, spinless little worm. https://t.co/iTXZadu82i
I had not previously heard of this backwoods MP. Seems that he was a teacher, somewhere; where? Only a (brief?) stint as headmaster of an unspecified school in Romania is noted. I suspect that he is yet another chancer and freeloader in the Commons. A Romanian wife who is a doctor in Bassetlaw, wherever that is (actually, Nottinghamshire). A prime candidate for my “Deadhead MPs” series. Watch this space.
In Brendan ‘nationalising children’ Clarke-Smith, Bassetlaw seems to have managed to find an MP even worse than John Mann. Solidarity with all those in the constituency who did not vote for him. You deserve better. As do children.
Perhaps Clarke-Smith might think about how real pay and the real level of State benefits have declined over the years, placing many —even many who are in full-time work— in poverty. He himself has presumably been able to live off his wife’s earnings (at least to a large extent) for years.
Source: 'But Conservative MP for Bassetlaw MP Brendan Clarke-Smith – who says he was a recipient of free school meals when he was a child – opposed the motion.'https://t.co/vO4BVmjHmM
Has anyone yet identified this superb citizen of Barnsley, who in a few clear phrases speaks more sense than you could hear in a month from the chattering classes in Parliament or on the disgraceful BBC? https://t.co/gDEogTqrzV
to vote against feeding poor children during a pandemic where parents are being denied universal credit, made redundant, unable to find new jobs bc the state of the economy, increasing costs EVERYWHERE etc just wow. but a pay rise for mp’s is apparently a necessity..?
Look at this despicable+seriously overweight man, claiming that "so much has been done for Universal Credit etc" completely ignoring the fact that a) UC is an utter shambles and b) hungry children can NOT wait for the months-long struggles to get food into their tummies🤬 https://t.co/7DlNtlg1eU
— Shoshana 🐝3.5% ⚪️🔴⚪️ Let's get into #GoodTrouble (@shoshanade) October 22, 2020
Sack this furlough & Universal Credit Shite. We need a Universal Basic Income. Minimum £1000 per month. This would still be less than minimum wage,more than the state pension,but liveable. Whether this is per person or household is debatable. This is affordable. 🙏😷🏴🏴🏴👍
Tory MPs blaming parents for children going hungry should really take a look at themselves. 10years of austerity, cuts to the system as well punitive universal credit measures has not helped people. Child poverty and homelessness has rocketed on their watch!
The idea that evil hypocrites such as Dunce Duncan Smith, the jew “lord” Freud, Esther McVey and Therese Coffey want to “help” people is naive, to say the least.
More tweets seen
The archive of last night's episode of Patriotic Weekly Review with Kelamaty & No Chance can be found on BitChute – please support my work on that platform as it contains a full archive of all my previous videos:https://t.co/zTrvlEpsxhpic.twitter.com/xDWMbqAvcv
No such thing as cake, I found milk, sugar and eggs in the recipe. This cake purity is ridiculous.
— 🏴☄️ Akura_Elvas ☄️🏴 (@AkuraElvas) October 21, 2020
Britain was greatest when her people weren’t being brainwashed into thinking they didn’t exist.
Imagine thinking our right to self-determination as indigenous people should ever be up for discussion. It’s not about appealing to the UN. It’s about appealing to our own. https://t.co/oL2l165Tig
Why does @ChtyCommission allow Zionist groups to ‘police’ UK citizens using tactics synonymous with The Cheka police. How long before ‘volunteers’ claim leather coats on expenses? Make no mistake #Chekism is alive and well just watch Joe Glasman’s video. https://t.co/zZvuGe5HWg
I would recommend that you inject some realism into your life. And what risks are you actually referring to? The selfish ones are those that are not bothering to look into what is really happening and are just lazily watching the TV and repeating what the 'paid for' puppets say pic.twitter.com/NM108ukNP3
1/2 Yes, but Professor Gupta is *also* more qualified than her (or you) to judge (and more qualified than Johnson, come to that) and *she* disagrees with Whitty. Experts aren't an excuse for ceasing to think . Intelligent people grasp that @jtwentyman. https://t.co/Wi53DEKAFi
2/2 @jtwentyman. But the BBC can be proud of you. Amazingly, you have managed to get through the past six months *wholly* unaware of the existence of scientific controversy (among experts!) about the wisdom of shutdown policies. Gosh. https://t.co/Wi53DEKAFi
The facemask zealots all pretend to be following The Science, but in reality their zealotry goes far deeper and has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with some strange wish to conform.
@DFlatwhite. You miss the point. Whatever people say in exalted moments, they support the NHS (and boy, do they, through heavy taxation) because they expect it to be there for them and their families when they need it. https://t.co/2MdBl9QlUO
I watched a BBC2 TV documentary about Venezuela. Something like Venezuela: Revolution in Ruins. I was of course au fait with the way in which other revolutions in history developed and, in many cases, degenerated: Russia/Soviet Union, China,
Cambodia/Kampuchea, Ethiopia, Cuba etc, even France (from 1789). However, I especially wanted to understand better why this country, Venezuela, rich in oil, huge in area, fertile, with a coastline on the Caribbean, a number of scenic islands and also a huge exclusive economic zone (EEZ) under the Law of the Sea, should be in such a condition that 3 million or more, 10% of its population, have now fled, that large numbers of its inhabitants are starving, or rummaging for food in trash cans or dumps, or are foraging wherever they can.
Why are basic items such as loo roll, bread, milk, even fruit (in a tropical country where many fruits grow wild) effectively unavailable? Why are basic medicines not available? Why is oil being imported when Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, exceeding even those of Saudi Arabia?
There is a natural human desire to make excuses for states espousing the overall values (superficially) espoused by the judging person. Thus we see pro-“socialist” people defending the Soviet record on human rights, living standards or generally, despite the early [Russian Civil] War Communism (under which strikers and others were shot, and anyone late for work could be imprisoned or sent to a labour camp), despite the Leninist and Stalinist repressions, the “GULAG Archipelago”, the Cheka/OGPU/GPU/NKVD/KGB etc. Thus we see people (British, other Europeans, North Americans, others) today defending Castro’s dictatorship in Cuba, despite the large number of persons shot, imprisoned or driven out under socialist rule.
The usual excuses for the failure of an old-style Marxist-Leninist socialist state are that:
foreign intervention ruined the economy and/or made the new regime more severely repressive than it otherwise would have been;
one or more individuals usurped or misused the power which properly belonged to “the people” and/or the “true” socialists;
existing private enterprises or wealthy persons either left the country (with their wealth) or stayed in the country and profiteered; in both cases, these parasitic classes of people sabotaged the socialist economy.
We can look at a few well-known examples to illustrate the syndrome.
Russia
Here is a typical example of a self-deluding socialist, one “Liz from Leeds”, heard via telephone on some daytime TV show (the black woman shown is the presenter):
Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar are supporters of Corbyn-Labour and part of a collective called Novara Media. I wrote about them —and others— in this article:
In that clip, hereinabove, “Liz from Leeds” asserts that Soviet socialism failed because
“14 foreign armies smashed it” and then
“Stalin took over and imposed a state-capitalistic totalitarian state”.
(and, by the way, “revolutionary” talking-head Ash Sarkar, on the show as a guest, and who teaches Global Politics at a former polytechnic —!—, can be seen nodding in apparent agreement at this ahistorical nonsense!).
“Liz from Leeds” obviously has little or no real knowledge of what seems to be her main interest, because:
the Intervention by “Western” powers in Russia only started to occur in July 1918, about 8 months after the start of the Russian Civil War. By that date, the various factions in the Civil War had already been fighting for months;
the largest and most powerful foreign contingent, the Czechoslovak Legion, eventually had 40,000 soldiers (93% Czech, 7% Slovak) in Russia, but this was not a foreign army in the sense of a state-controlled force. Czechoslovakia only declared independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in December 1918. The Czechs etc were in Russia because they had been fighting with the Russian Empire against the Central Powers (including Austria-Hungary) in the First World War.
all this in a country of vast extent (over 90x the size of the UK), encompassing 11 time zones, in which the Bolshevik forces numbered some 5.5 million (and the White or anti-Bolshevik forces about 2.4 million).
in other words, the Intervention was fundamentally a side-show in the Russian Civil War. The war started in late 1917, eight months before Intervention, and continued until late 1922, two years after almost all Allied forces had left in 1920 (though Japanese forces occupied small parts of the later-termed “Soviet Far East” until 1922, and part of Sakhalin Island until 1925); in fact, the larger contingents, such as the 23,000 Greek troops in and around Odessa (to protect Black Sea Greeks), were only there for three months;
while Intervention affected the development of the Soviet Union (established late 1922), it did so mainly in the psychological sense. In fact, there were still outbreaks of anti-Soviet fighting as late as 1934 (in Central Asia), but there was no foreign backing for that. It was purely local and regional.
As to personality-cult etc, Stalin expanded the slave-state aspects of the Soviet Union, but that already existed: Lenin and his fellow-Communists (Jews and part-Jews, mostly, such as Dzerzhinsky) set up that system as soon as they seized power (in one fairly small corner of the Empire, i.e. Petrograd and Moscow, initially): executions on a vast scale, prison camps, prisons, labour camps, secret police and so on;
the Soviet Union was “State Capitalism”, but that was not the creation of Stalin. It was there from the very start of Lenin’s rule;
even the system of “nomenklatura”, with its gradations of special rations (the best being the Kremlin Ration [Kremlyovsky Payok], which developed under Stalin into a whole sector of special-privilege shops, apartments, health services etc), started during the Civil War: http://www.polithistory.ru/en/visit_us/view.php?id=1735
As to sabotage by parasitic classes, the Bolsheviks first destroyed (killed, exiled, imprisoned) the Imperial Family, then the aristocracy and the wealthy merchant class, but then moved on to those peasant families who were more affluent than average (the “kulaks“), then later to the peasantry as a whole (via Collectivization). Eventually new targets had to be found: a myriad of Diversionists, Deviationists, Trotskyists etc. “Enemies of the people”. By that time, most of the “former people” of pre-1918 had been exiled overseas, killed, imprisoned, or reduced to complete poverty in internal exile. Few existed in Soviet territory, outside camps and prisons, after the 1930s.
The “Liz from Leeds” school of cod-history is based on small nuggets of truth as well as large measures of wishful thinking. The Tsarist system was in need of reform; there were huge inequities; there was a foreign Intervention, though very limited, composed arguably of 12 mostly small forces rather than “14 armies” (and never intended to actually overthrow Bolshevism); there was the cult of personality (though it predated Stalin’s supremacy and was the child of Lenin, Trotsky/Bronstein and others in the early 1920s); there were wealthy or not-poor classes who could to some extent be described as parasitic (especially the absentee and rentier nobles). It is worth remembering that, pre-1914, the Russian economy was booming, and looked like overtaking Europe and North America before long.
However, the Soviet Union was badly flawed from its inception, and its evil seed was Marxism-Leninism. The idea that the political sphere (the State) should rule over both the economic sphere and the sphere of spirit, culture, education, medicine, was wrong in conception and was bound to lead to a greater or lesser disaster. The same mistaken conception brought low other lands (eg Cuba) and, our present interest, Venezuela.
In fact, the syndrome, in less savage or severe forms, also applies to the social-democratic regimes in Europe, such as the post-1945 British governments. Harold Wilson of the Labour Party blamed “speculators” and “the Gnomes of Zurich” (Swiss bankers) for the UK’s economic problems of the 1960s and mid-1970s, rather than nationalized industries and subsidies paid to industry and agriculture.
Below, a cartoon for “Liz from Leeds” and her colleagues in (?) the local social workers’ union or comprehensive school staff-room:
Cuba
The same applies to Cuba: socio-economic inequities, leading to revolution. That revolution elevating personalities (Fidel, Che etc). State takeover of the economy, including all major industry and agriculture. Eventually, shortages, corruption (you don’t think that Castro lived like the poor mulatto saps he ruled, do you?), repression. Cuba even had ineffective foreign (US) interventions: the Bay of Pigs botched “invasion” by proxy, the sanctions regime imposed by the USA (termed “Blockade” by Castro); attempts to assassinate Castro in various absurd ways (eg poisoned ice-cream). As for scapegoating, the Cuban regime has blamed American policy, counter-revolutionary Cubans based in Miami, but also Cubans in Cuba and who wanted to leave in the 1960s and 1970s, which people were called gusanos (“worms”).
The Cuban economy was kept afloat by Soviet subsidy (direct subsidy and also via preferential pricing of Cuban agricultural exports to the Soviet Union) until the early 1990s. Cuba then had to introduce a free-market element to the economy, in order to prevent complete collapse.
Venezuela
So we return to Venezuela. Again, socio-economic inequities led to demands for reform. Eventually, a revolution by election happened, in 1998, in this case led by an Army general, Hugo Chavez. I have no idea what Chavez was like as a general (though judging by his botched first coup d’etat, in 1992, not very effective), but as a political leader I regard him as having been a blundering clown, sometimes well-meaning, genial, friendly, sometimes sinister and frightening. In fact, with his televized clowning, inability to master facts, and populist emoting, he was reminiscent of a certain British politician, one who is superficially on another ideological page— Boris Johnson.
As the TV documentary I saw noted, Venezuela’s oil wealth bankrolled the social programmes which improved the lot of many of the poorer Venezuelans. Chavez was voted into power by 56% of the population, mostly the poor and some of the “disenchanted middle class”.
No attempt was made to diversify the economy. When oil prices fell, Venezuela went into a spiral. The tensions within the country worsened, many left (the wealthy by air to the USA and other countries, the middleclass nouveaux pauvres and the real/always-been poor by car or on foot to neighbouring countries).
The US sanctions on Venezuela have enabled the Venezuelan government, now under Maduro, to claim, however implausibly, that those sanctions largely caused the economic collapse.
Chavez expropriated and redistributed land, again with “good intentions”, but the net result has been both a falling-off in food production and a great fall in dollar-exports, which in turn restricted the supply of foreign imports of food (and other goods).
Chavez blamed “speculators and hoarders” for the problems, imposed price controls, replaced private supermarkets by a chain of 16,000 State shops and supermarkets, which however now have almost bare shelves. Chavez also nationalized large food producers. The result has been a breakdown in food supply. Children are starving, adults and children alike scavenge in the trash for anything to eat. The Roman Catholic Church has asked those who discard any food waste to label it so that people can rummage in the rubbish dumps and trash cans for it. Meanwhile, the government set up 6,000 soup kitchens.
Thoughts
I have never been to Venezuela (nor any part of Latin America south of Panama), and I have only known one person who has visited the country (a girlfriend who attended a week-long international conference in Caracas in the 1980s). My views are therefore taken from what I have read and what I have watched on TV.
It is clear to me that Venezuela’s problems are, at root, political. There was always poverty there, but the cure has been worse than the illness. Chavez was a political clown, who had no idea how to run a government, let alone an economy, but who decided, amid clowning and behaving like a public entertainer, to take the reins of the economy firmly in his own hands. He took over the oil industry, agriculture, food production and distribution, imports and exports generally, even banking. He tried to run industries himself or via equally-inept cronies.
The result has been disastrous. Thousands and quite possibly millions may have died from lack of food and medicine, as well as via militarized repression (the troops always look fit and well-fed…). To my mind, those responsible for this politico-economic disaster could not complain were they to be taken out and shot. Chavez himself died a few years ago; his daughter is apparently one of the wealthiest women in the world. Before people start praising Chavez, they might start to ask where those hundreds of millions of dollars came from.
What Chavez should have done would have been to
regulate, tax, but not operate businesses;
by all means nationalize oil production, as a national strategic asset, but employ only experts experienced in upstream and downstream oil to operate it;
work with landowners (existing landowners and new entrants) to maximize and diversify domestic food production; set a cap on acreage held by any one family;
revalue the currency;
create social programmes from taxes raised, not directly from oil revenues.
All the same, there are those in British political life who praised Chavez: Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, to name the two most prominent. They have been quiet about Venezuela for a while now, as that country slides into chaos, but some of their colleagues still beat the drum. Here is Chris Williamson MP (whom I am loath to impliedly criticize, because he is pro-animal welfare, and used to retweet me on Twitter occasionally; and because the Jew-Zionists hate him, but truth conquers all):
(in fact, the Venezuelan government has only hit 24% of its housing target, though the programme itself may be OK in principle).
It seems to me that the only thing to do in Venezuela is to rip up the Chavez-Maduro system and begin ad novum. That means a different government, an all-out war on crime, corruption and disorder, a private-enterprise economy (except for oil production), a clear and effective tax system, an appeal for all Venezuelans now overseas to return and to help rebuild. Also, the government has lost control of the borders of the State and has lost control of the streets. Gangs are rampant. Firing squads may be necessary. An effective border force must be set up. Above all, consumer goods and/or including food must be prioritized, urgently. In this case, butter before guns, up to a point at least.
Racial Aspects
Racial aspects are important. Cuba was ruled by Spanish-descended Europeans and to some extent also mestizos, until Castro drove most of them to the USA or elsewhere. Now Cuba has a far higher percentage of blacks than it had in 1959. Venezuela is about 54% mestizo, only 43% white (and that figure is out of date; there must be far fewer white people now).
Could It Happen Elsewhere?
Never say never. Russia was booming only four or five years before it fell into civil war and despair under Lenin. Cuba, though corrupt and unequal, was in a far better state in the 1940s and 1950s (even though plagued by the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky etc) than it is now. From what I have seen on TV, much of Havana seems to be just falling apart, literally. As to Europe, who knows? Reasonably-civilized Yugoslavia fell into civil war and bloody chaos only 25 years ago.
Now that Europe has been invaded by untermenschen, who are breeding, who knows what lies ahead? Britain is increasingly non-white, while the real British (white) population is, in my view at least, less and less cultured. You only have to look at those who are now MPs. Many MPs, and not only Labour Party ones, would not have been seen in the Palace of Westminster before the 1990s, unless working as cleaners or office staff.
As to economy, we have seen that Corbyn-Labour (yes, well-meaning, as were many radicals and revolutionaries prior to taking power) has praised Castro, Chavez, even Lenin and Trotsky! British Labour Party policy may not go as far as that which Labour leaders have praised in other lands, but never say never…
Listening again to painfully naive “Liz from Leeds”, it occurs to me that her definition of “Communism” could apply to almost any self-describing political movement, as well as to, say, Christianity. In fact, Valentin Tomberg [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Tomberg], whose mother and pet dog were both killed (tied to a tree and shot) by those lovely kind Communists after the Bolshevik Revolution, made the point in one of his works that it was the small “Christian” element in Communism that made people willing to support it and struggle for it.
“Communism” as defined by “Liz from Leeds” is the sort of platitudinous wishful thought that might be heard on Radio 4’s Thought For The Day. Stalin once cut short a discussion (which must have been unwittingly hilarious) among his mostly useless Politburo members, as to what “Socialism” (the earlier stage, in Marxist theory) was, by saying “I’ll define Socialism for you— it’s where the Red Army halts its trucks!”
21 January 2019: a few more thoughts
Some reading the above article may imagine that my being opposed to fossilized 20thC socialism must mean that I am a free-market anti-communist and nothing more. Not so. My views favour policies which are social, rather than socialist. For me, economic enterprises must be regulated and taxed (and that is the business of government), but not directly run by the State. By the same token, the world of business must not interfere with the organs of the State, must not buy or own politicians or civil servants.
29 January 2019
It occurs to me that Che Guevara was at least to some extent in the real world, unlike most of those who admire him…
Andrew Neil on BBC2 This Week nails Ken Livingstone to the mast…
"If all that's true, it would be appalling, but I have watched America impose sanctions… an appalling impact on their country" @ken4london on how Alan Johnson & Esther McVey reacted to his #bbctw film
Below, an interview with Venezuelan quasi-dictator Maduro. While he is probably right to say that the USA would like to have a firmer superpower grip on Venezuela, Maduro cannot explain Venezuela’s fall into chaotic poverty by reference to that American wish or strategy. He’s an idiot…
President Maduro tries to make a BBC journalist understand the political war that the US extreme right is waging against Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/fNQZplj1W1
Venezuela's health crisis is so bad that patients who go the hospital need to bring their own food and medical supplies, like syringes and scalpels, as well as their own soap and water, says a new report. https://t.co/dFRcpuS4X5
"While migrants and cocaine leave Venezuelan shores in growing quantities, food and medicines travel the other way, for purchase by those in Venezuela who still have access to hard currency," writes @JerryMcdermott:https://t.co/InI2XAYPi3
The coup isn't organic, nor is the destabilisation that has been steady levelling Venezuela for some time now. It's just the flavour of the year 'guy that needs to go and make sure the media tells everyone why'. I assume Guaido is being paid well by someone. pic.twitter.com/ti2J0XRCYw
Well, the Venezuelan rebellion has failed, mainly because the Army would not back it. Also it seems that the leader of the uprising, who now hides out in the Spanish Embassy in Caracas, is a silly ineffective fellow. We saw something similar in Zimbabwe, when the opposition yo Mugabe years ago was led by a silly and thick African (supposed) “liberal” (later killed in the USA, in a plane crash). The lesson is that a dictator may be opposed by less wicked people but those possibly better people may simply be ineffective.
Meanwhile, for the Venezuelan poor (i.e. almost all inhabitants), the agony (caused mainly by simplistic socialism) continues:
Venezuela’s fall is the single largest economic collapse outside of war in at least 45 years, economists say https://t.co/EP1bJWFTJV
Here is another little twit of the same or similar tribe, one “Chris#WeBackCorbyn/@Socialist_Chris”:
Criminals, thieves and worse. I wouldn't even allow them to stand.
I don't agree with fascist parties being allowed to take part in democratic elections, considering they stand for dismantling democracy in the first place.https://t.co/p7BY8nQeUy
— Chris #WeBackCorbyn (@Socialist_Chris) July 16, 2019
To understand the fullness of this idiot’s repressive ideological fanaticism, you have to read the whole thread. He thinks that parties or people which are “fascist” (as decided by him? as decided by a troika of secret police officers? as decided by a Stalinist-style fixed meeting of “activists”?) should be barred from elections or other political activity.
“Socialist Chris” seems very limited in his mentality. His derivative and flawed narrative about being intolerant of intolerance is not only hackneyed in the extreme, but is dependent on him or people like him deciding what is “fascist” (and so unacceprable…to him). He says that “you cannot compare fascism and socialism”. In a sense, true. Many 20thC types of “socialism” were far worse (more repressive, more evil, less effective in any field but repression) than Fascism (eg Mussolini, Franco) or even (different from “Fascism”), National Socialism.
Those books, and thousands of others, show that when relatively undiluted “socialism” takes power (whether by force or election), political freedom vanishes. That has been true in every instance of importance, from the Soviet Union and China to Cuba and Venezuela.
I suppose that “Socialist Chris” would make the usual excuses (see above) re. all that. He cannot see that “socialism” in the 20th (and now 21st Century, as far as “socialism” has even existed since 1989) is and has been far more repressive than either “fascism” or National Socialism (and that both Fascism and National Socialism achieved far more for the people than Marxist (etc) “socialism”, and in far less time.
An idiot, and yet looking at his tweets, I see that he makes much of having written a “dissertation” (on post-1945 “fascism”). No university mentioned. Maybe Oxford, maybe Cambridge, maybe the God-Knows-Where University of Travel and Tourism, who knows? No mention of a specific profession or occupation, just that he works up to 13 hours a day (which seems doubtful, but maybe that’s life in a call centre…I wouldn’t know).
Here’s another idiot, supporting “Socialist Chris”:
No, that isn't what he is suggesting. But they aren't legitimate political ideology, unless you want to consider the nazis a legitimate entity rather than a genocidal regime. Nazis shouldn't be allowed to get into power. Nazis aren't democratic.
What happens if they stand, win and then remove the vote? You know, without telling you before they won that election that they would seek to do so?
Ahh sure don't worry about it, it'll never happen again, we've all learned so much. 🙄 https://t.co/QmxlVKHLdV
— Chris #WeBackCorbyn (@Socialist_Chris) July 16, 2019
Marxist “socialists” wouldn’t do that, would they? Remove the vote from people? Never! Ha ha! No, they would more likely seize power forcibly in the first place, then label all opposition “fascist” (and so barred from existing at all), then hold meaningless “votes” in elections containing only approved non-“fascists”…
It is worrying that someone such as “Socialist Chris” can undergo primary, secondary and tertiary education, including as it seems a valueless “Master’s degree” and even perhaps a pointless “doctorate”, yet still be unable to reason. But that is where we are…
Update, 25 August 2013
Here’s another idiot, one @eshaLegal. A lawyer? If so, remarkably ill-informed about modern history, especially that of the Soviet Union, Stalin etc. Seems to be an Indian or Pakistani living in the USA. Read the thread to see others put her right, more or less right anyway.
Victims of Stalinism? You mean Nazi war criminals? You want us to remember Nazi war criminals along with Nazi victims?
I am moved to write this by a couple of stimuli. First of all by a UK Labour Party National Executive Committee delegate (I think on the NEC as “youth” representative) to some recent conference in Cuba, and who said something like how wonderful it was to be in a country which showed how real socialism worked.
The second impetus came from an interview I heard on BBC World Service radio: an interview with an “artist” of whom I had never heard, called Tania Bruguera. Apparently, her father had been a Cuban diplomat and politician, and had actually handed her over aged 7 (or maybe I misheard and it was 17) to the security police with the statement that she had said anti-“Fidel” things and that the security police should do with her what they liked. She now says that that was a result of the Cuban system of selfish save-your-own-neck denunciation (rather than her own father being a complete shit, which is what she probably really thinks).
I looked up her “art” (“installations”, “performance art” etc). Unimpressed. To me, it looks like talentless rubbish. Having said that, she has the right to do it, which right is not accepted in Cuba. She is allowed to travel fairly freely. These days, she gets hassled and threatened, at times arrested, though not simply shot or chucked into a concentration camp or prison, which is what might have happened in the 1960s or 1970s.
There is the nagging feeling that Corbyn and many around him actually view states such as Cuba, 1980s Nicaragua, or even the Venezuela of recent years as success stories. I have previously blogged about Corbyn’s almost fossilized politics and policies, as well as his friendly or supportive attitude towards Cuba:
As regular readers of this blog will know, I am not totally hostile to Corbyn and at least some of his supporters (vis a vis the misnamed “Conservatives”), inasmuch as the Corbynists want to create a more equitable society in the UK, want to control or remove the Jewish-Zionist influence which has been so pervasive since about 1989, want people to have decent health, housing, social security etc. The devil, however, is in the detail.
The intellectual inconsistency of many of the Corbynists is shown by the fact that while they oppose Jewish exploitation of and behaviour toward the Palestinian Arabs, they ignore the same pattern when Jews exploit British, German or French (or Russian!) people; they also often still unthinkingly parrot “holocaust” propaganda. Corbyn and John McDonnell are themselves prime examples.
Another example: Most people accept that, in any market economy, more labour available means lower unit labour cost. Many of the Corbyn-Labour people disagree. They say that mass immigration makes no real difference to pay, even at the lower levels. Employers are to blame for exploiting employees and government is to blame for not simply setting a high minimum pay level. Faced with that kind of economic illiteracy, one tends to shake head and refuse to argue. Those people, though, genuinely think that all that has to be done for paradise to descend is for the State to lay down and enforce pay levels and, indeed, price levels.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, many years ago, that one can have a welfare state, and one can have open borders (and consequent mass immigration), but one cannot have both. When will Labour MPs and members wake up to this?
While there is room for relatively minor tinkering with pay and prices (minimum pay, enforced cheap prices in targeted areas such as public transport etc, even Basic Income —which I favour—), for the State to overwhelm the economic sphere is to invite the economic paralysis that caused even Cuba (and, famously, 1980s China) to introduce quasi-free market reforms, as indeed did Lenin himself in the Soviet Union, via his New Economic Policy of the 1920s. Complete State control of the economy leads to shortages or even economic collapse, as we see in Venezuela. I do not see much understanding of these truths in Corbyn or McDonnell.
It is in relation to mass immigration that we see the madness most obviously. In a sense, this is unsurprising. Polls have shown for some years that Labour is mainly voted for by the “blacks and browns”, in the sense that the one demographic which is very pro-Labour is that of the ethnic minorities (except the Jews, who hate Corbyn’s anti-Zionist tendencies).
I should not let anyone reading this go away under the misapprehension that I “prefer” the Conservatives to Labour. I oppose both main System parties, and Labour is at least (in parts, in some senses) anti-Zionist now. I also despise what the Conservatives have done since 2010 to trash society. However, anyone who thinks that Labour is a real alternative need only look at the total deadheads around Corbyn. Look at Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler (both of whom might well be Cabinet ministers under a Corbyn prime ministership!), or the recently disgraced MPs Kate Osamor and Fiona Onasanya (the latter will almost certainly be in prison soon). Not only blacks, by the way: Angela Rayner, for example, would probably be a Cabinet minister under a Corbyn government. Words start to fail…
I favour Labour over Conservative not because I imagine that Labour’s idiots are actually able to operate a government, but because
Corbyn and many of his supporters are now fighting directly against Zionism here in the UK, not merely in the Middle East; and
a weak government under Corbyn can lay the ground for social nationalism.
Notes
The title of this blog post of course refers back to the 1920 Leninist pamphlet usually referred to as Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder [Детская болезнь “левизны” в коммунизме], perhaps more accurately translated as The Children’s Illness, “Leftism”, in Communism. However, in using the words “infantile” and “disordered” to refer to some aspects of “Corbynism”, or some people in Corbyn-Labour, I do so advisedly…
I thought to include a few examples. Here’s one. Stupid enough to state on UK TV that she is “literally a Communist”! Hardy ha ha…but note that her absurd statement did not make her a pariah, despite the hugely bloodstained history of Communism/Socialism. Now what if she had said that she was “literally a National Socialist”? Hm…Ash Sarkar’s statement did not prevent her from continuing to write for major newspapers occasionally, and also to appear on TV from time to time. The Jewish influence over the mass media is right in front of us, and in the case of TV, “literally”!
Senior Editor @novaramedia. Literature bore. Anarcho-fabulous. Muslim. THFC. Walks like a supermodel. Fucks like a champion. Luxury communism now!“
Here is her Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Sarkar which, unbelievably, states that she “lectures in global politics at Anglia Ruskin University” [former Anglia Polytechnic].
Wikipedia adds that “Sarkar’s great-great-aunt, Pritilata Waddedar, was a Bengali nationalist and an active participant in armed struggle against the British Empire in 1930s Bengal. Her grandmother is a hospital carer…Her mother is a social worker who was an anti-racist and trade union activist in the 1970s and 1980s. Sarkar’s mother helped “organise marches…“
“The Times has described her as “Britain’s loudest Corbynista“…and Dazed magazine said she is one of “the voices resetting the political agenda in the UK”.” [Wikipedia]
Basically, an enemy of the British people.
and take a look, or rather listen, to one “Liz from Leeds”, whose incredibly naive and just plain wrong (inaccurate, ahistorical) idea of, inter alia, “why Soviet socialism failed” is actually unintentionally funny. “Novara Media” (the collective of Corbyn supporters Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani etc) tweeting that “Liz from Leeds” was correct! [the black woman shown is the TV show presenter]
I don't get Ash Sarkar, the one annoying mouthpiece Corbyn's Labour. Also her media org sounds like…a virus? Also can you really be an academic without a phd? if you're teaching in universities, aren't you supposed to be somewhat neutral? also her politics is..shit and racist?
None of it is activism. Laurie Penny bobbing about as well like a bad namesake. They’re narcissistic exhibitionists getting paid and academically endowed for striking poses. Ash Sarkar is cut from similar cloth. Why the fuck does anyone take them seriously?
and here is another idiot, Hevreziya-Something, attempting to sound like a real “Communist” (who thinks that he –sounds more like she, but apparently not– can be “Anarchist” and –a male–“Feminist”, and a “Populist” etc all at the same time!…oh, and an economist…once he has finished school, that is, though he claims to have been commenting for years; age does not preclude political infantilism, I suppose)
This is why punching Nazis is crucial, as Ash Sarkar has said
— Hevrêziya Maherîzmê (Hood/Road Economist) (@HRZ_MRZ) January 3, 2019
he offers political advice in the tweet below, which made me laugh out loud (the bit about a General Strike in UK and USA, but the first tweet is also amusingly naive):
There needs to be a general strike – for all industries. We need to shut them down before they shut us down. ‘(Labour leader) Jeremy Corbyn should be firm and make his stance clear. ‘Labour should kick out the Blairites.’
— Hevrêziya Maherîzmê (Hood/Road Economist) (@HRZ_MRZ) January 2, 2019
More?
I'm not one to gossip, but I feel sorry for Liam Hemsworth, Miley Cyrus has a lot of past, and God knows she will cheat on him, all of us know this, but only a few will say it
— Hevrêziya Maherîzmê (Hood/Road Economist) (@HRZ_MRZ) December 27, 2018
Well, I think that I shall draw a veil over that particular “Communist/Anarchist/Populist” now! He/she probably has to go and wash its hair or something…
The trouble is that there are literally thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands, quite as stupid. Most support Labour. Many, such as Ash Sarkar and the Hevreziya-someone tweeter, above, are of non-European origin, but there are many others, such as the Englishwoman tweeting below, calling herself “Countess Helen Nonny Nay” [since this blog post was written, altered to Cringing Peasant Helen NonnyNay], who thinks that white British families who want a better life should just “fuck off” as the UK welcomes the dregs of Africa and Asia to our shores…
I don't care if a whinging family decide to move to Australia or not. Go on, fuck off! Or stay here – it makes no difference to me.
Caught out by background TV while doing my dusting. 💃
Actually, the sad thing is that some of these people have their hearts sort-of in the right place in some respects— animal welfare, a better society, anti-Jew-Zionism (though most are still brainwashed by the “holocaust” scam/myth). The white Northern European ones would support social-nationalism were they not so indoctrinated and silly.
Update, 6 January 2019
Another idiot, Laurie Penny, who was at one time on TV occasionally (like Owen Jones), until even msm people realized that (like Owen Jones) she is pretty much a one-trick pony…
Do these people, the Owen Jones’s, the Laurie Penny’s etc, realize that their intolerance (yes, their intolerance) might one day not only bring society (the Social Contract) crashing down, but bring down the skies on their own little worlds? I doubt it.
but then, the resistance…
Marxism-Leninism as a political force was destroyed or ebbed away to nothing by 1989 and a host of (other) devils have rushed in to fill the vacuum…
In the end, a complete cleansing of UK (and world) society will have to take place.
Further Update, 6 January 2019
I happened to see the photo below, a kind of “family portrait”: Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani in what is perhaps a room designed with reference to either “luxury Communism” or tasteless tat. You decide…
Below, Andrew Neil nails Ken Livingstone on Venezuela…
"If all that's true, it would be appalling, but I have watched America impose sanctions… an appalling impact on their country" @ken4london on how Alan Johnson & Esther McVey reacted to his #bbctw film
Not that everything said by Ash Sarkar (or Aaron Bastani) is wrong. This, below, is right (because grounded in reality, not incorrect theory):
It just really brought home to me that so many people in this country are in similar positions: trapped in low-paid and precarious work, up to their eyeballs in debt, with children and families to care for, but no avenue into quality employment.
What Ash Sarkar and her ilk cannot accept, if only because it might imply that they themselves should clear out of the UK, is that mass immigration is, ultimately, “white genocide” by replacement of real British (i.e. white) people by blacks, browns and others.
He's no different to you: another foreign invader with a massive chip on their shoulder and an even greater inferiority complex. You hate this nation and its people, but are happy to reap its benefits.
— DeAndre DeShawn DeWilliams (@PaddyThePinko) March 1, 2019
Here we see some reaction to Ash Sarkar’s and Owen Jones’s doormatting for the Jewish lobby…
Seems that “someone” sees a vacancy in the msm-approved “licensed Bolshevik” slot previously occupied by Owen Jones (usually by Owen Jones; sometimes Laurie Penny or others). That way, the msm can say, “look! We are open to all shades of opinion, even radical and revolutionary ones!”, while in fact only inviting the kind of people who are in reality completely harmless to the ZOG/NWO System. Non-white or Jewish faux-rebels. White social-nationalists are, of course, banned…
Update, 20 July 2019
A late entrant, a comedienne (for the brainwashed, that’s “comedian”, apparently…), of whom I have never heard but who I am sure is very proud to have 130K Twitter followers (and I am sure at least a few dozen regularly read her tweets…). She believes in “anti-fascist action” and intimidating anyone standing up for free speech.
Prize for the first person who tries to take issue to supporting anti fascist action. The prize is a little mute. That’s right, silencing and no platforming you! Boooooooo! Scary!!!!!
and, quelle surprise, she has been contracted at various times for those present gravediggers of culture, Channel 4 (usually a gravedigger) and the BBC (sometimes a gravedigger).
…from the Independent, reporting on beach patrols at Dover; all too typical of the sort of persons now prominent in “Labour” and what is left of the trade unions:
“Riccardo La Torre, firefighter and Eastern Region Secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, branded the coast patrol “despicable” and said: “These have-a-go, racist vigilantes have no place in any kind of enforcement or emergency activities and will only serve to make conditions and tensions worse.”
So “Riccardo La Torre” (que?), a regional secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, thinks that migrant invaders from Africa and the Middle East are “working class people”, who are “trying to get to safety”?!
Safety from, er, France? There you have in a nutshell, the craziness that is much of “Labour” now. Alien migrant-invaders are “working class people”, who should be allowed to occupy the UK at will (and be subsidized too)!
Note particularly the fag-end “Marxism”, trying to shoehorn the facts into some 1980s polytechnic back-of-postcard Marxism-Leninism.
This evening, I watched a show called something like “The Real Marigold Hotel”, in which four elderly once-“celebrities” went to a country (in this case, Cuba) in order to see what facilities might be available for retired people. As such, as a “documentary”, it was very superficial and lacking depth, though entertaining. What interested me was the society in general.
The Cuba –actually just Havana– shown (and I have never been there, though I am quite well acquainted with its history of the past century and, in the manner of Sarah Palin, have glimpsed it from the air and from the sea) was in fact largely the stereotype: old American cars in pastel pink and blue, decrepit but charming colonial mansions, palm trees etc.
The old people went to cultural classes and talked to Cubans in parks. It struck me anew that any society is a package: Cuba has some culture (both European and its own mixture incorporating the Caribbean and African, as well as that of the USA.
The Havana shown was one where the parks were (on the face of it) safe to visit, the people well-educated (one or two Cubans carefully making the point that their good education had been free, as were the classes available to the elderly).
Most people know that the Cuban healthcare system is also very good, both in relative and absolute terms. On the other hand, and as the TV programme noted, the Internet is tightly controlled, requires a card (no doubt traceable..) and is mostly only available in “wi-fi” areas such as certain parks; not so many have home Internet connection.
It is perhaps pointless to reiterate what most of us know in terms of the Cuban police state (which –in all the documentary films I have ever seen– is so pervasive that it is invisible: you never see the hand of the State in plain sight, though it is there all right).
So there you have the Cuban package: low crime rate (supposedly), no obvious disorder, at least some rather polite, cultured citizens, good education and healthcare etc (one Cuban did say that it was better before the supportive Soviet Union collapsed), as well as a certain charm.
As against that, a socialist state which controls the news and Internet tightly, imprisons dissidents for years (not to mention the large number who, in the late 1950s and 1960s, were just shot); a socialized economy which (leaving aside the effect of American embargo) was and largely is hopelessly inefficient at providing consumer goods. Travel restrictions, too.
Let us take a different case. The German Reich in the 1930s was intolerant of dissidents too, though it was far more tolerant than was the Soviet Union under Stalin or, indeed, Cuba under Fidel.
The National Socialist state imprisoned some dissidents or placed them in concentration camps such as Dachau (though few now know that many served short sentences, such as 3 months, there, and were not there indefinitely). Others were encouraged or more or less forced out of the country. There was a generally militarized ethos. How could a state both German and quasi-socialist be anything else?
In the Reich, there was state interference in culture (though, again, far less than, say, in the Soviet Union). Consumer production was given a lower priority than rearmament (“Guns Before Butter”), though large projects for the benefit of the people were also pushed into the foreground: the Autobahnen; the VW “people’s car”; the 1936 Olympics; a huge programme of educational and cultural events; the Kraft durch Freude [“Strength through Joy”] programme of Canary Islands cruises and Baltic beach holidays for the people (at a time when, in the UK, most people who had a holiday at all were corralled into poky Blackpool guest houses…); better nutrition for young people, too.
The National Socialist Reich was hugely beneficial for most Germans, certainly compared to what existed in the Weimar period. The Reich solved the inflation problem, the unemployment problem, the decadence problem and, yes, what it termed “the Jewish question”.
In the UK at the same time, there was greater ostensible “freedom”: elections every 5 years, the freedom to eat daily at the Ritz or at the Savoy Grill (if one had the funds..), no obvious book censorship (though, behind the scenes, there was much, not least via the Jewish element, even then). There was officialtheatre and cinema censorship (via the Lord Chamberlain’s office) and there was also, of course, grinding poverty (especially outside the South East), and a very repressive justice and prison system; not to mention the pervasive class system and its inequities.
No state, no political system is “perfect”. All have flaws, and all (most, at least) have benefits (though what might be the benefits of living in, say, North Korea or the Congo might be disputed). The aim can only be to do the best with what is available at the material time. We take everything as a package, as a whole.
I had no intention of writing about Cuba or Castro following the recent death of “Fidel”. However, the public and mass media reaction, much of it an outpouring of adulation and “me-too” faux-liberal compromise, has impelled me to write.
There is no doubt that Cuba before Castro was corrupt and, for many, poor. Before Castro there was Batista and before Batista, Prio (Carlos Prio Socarras), of whom the British historian Hugh Thomas wrote, memorably, in his mammoth history of the country, that he “fell like a rotten fruit, full of its own corruption.” Prío himself later said of his presidency: “They say that I was a terrible president of Cuba. That may be true. But I was the best president Cuba ever had.”[see Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. New York: Houghton Mifflin (2002) p 216].
Prio was in fact someone who tried to keep to constitutional proprieties and it was his decision not to act extra-judicially which allowed the harsher figure of Batista to seize power in 1952, Prio himself having been elected (by free and contested election) in 1948.
Cuba in the 1950s was sometimes described as somewhere between a Latin American country and a detached, poorer, part of the United States, the latter for long its effective suzerain.
It would be easier to make a quick judgment of Castro’s rule had the United States not (and typically) engaged in ham-fisted great-power and quasi-colonialist geopolitics over the island. Those American interventions continue to muddy the waters: attempts to assassinate Castro, the Bay of Pigs “invasion” of 1961; above all, the partial embargo (which Cuba called a “blockade”) imposed initially in 1960.
No-one can say for sure whether Cuba would be much different had it had the chance to trade freely with the USA, its neighbour and natural main trading partner. Probably not much. Venezuela is another and more recent example of the inability of a Latin American socialist economy to perform adequately for long.
The bien-pensant “usual suspects” in the UK (the absurd Tariq Ali, Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn etc) are now saying that the Castro dictatorship was sort-of acceptable because Cuba had good education and good medical services. On that basis, they should be very kind indeed to German National Socialism, which provided the same and in fact far more (and with far less repression, in reality).
In fact, long before the Soviet subsidy disappeared, Havana was falling to pieces, as were the Cuban roads and railways. I myself had fleeting and peripheral contact with Cuba, otherwise seen by me only from the sea (between Cuba and the Bahamas) and the air (flying over Cuba between Tampa, Florida and Grand Cayman).
I was asked, when a practising barrister in London circa 1995, to help a scientific start-up based at Porton Down, Wiltshire, the high-security biological warfare facility, then recently partly-privatized. A small company of scientists had a bacterium which turned biomass into fuel (unscientific me calling it the turning of straw into gold). I thought of Cuba with its sugar-cane detritus, lack of fuel and high technical-education levels. Unfortunately, the Cuban Embassy in London did not respond, unlike the Ukrainian: I visited Porton Down with the then Ukrainian Ambassador, Mr. Komisarenko [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serhiy_Komisarenko]. Nothing came of that in the end, but it seems that, in more recent years, a company called Havana Energy, headed by ex-Labour Party MP Brian Wilson, has been producing energy that way in Cuba. The Cuban Embassy’s unresponsiveness told me all I needed to know about the Cuban bureaucracy: unalert, lethargic, useless, bearing in mind the country’s crying need for fuel.
Since the early 1990s, Cuba has gradually been moving towards a capitalist economy. No doubt that process will continue. Eventually, some kind of greater rapprochement with the USA will happen.
In this blog post, I am more interested in the puerile reaction of the kind of people in the UK who are letting off Castro on human rights and economic efficiency because Cubans have a health service and a school system. Jeremy Corbyn has excelled himself in ignorant misunderstanding. He just digs himself deeper with every statement.
The mass media and in particular the BBC is, as one might expect, doing its bit to eulogize about Castro, saying that he “turned a small island into a major force in world affairs.” Where does one start in unpacking such nonsense?
The reaction to Castro’s death tells me something else: those in the UK who think themselves “socialist” are willing to turn a blind eye to historical, political and economic realities so long as the label is right.
